After a lot of procrastination, and a little bit of actual work getting in the way, here is the final installment of the story that I started a few months back. Hope you enjoy:
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Population
“It’s that time again ace.” I leaned on the door jam of the entrance to Spence’s makeshift room, which is really just the split between two sheets hung down the middle of our space.
“What time?”
“Rent time.”
“Hmm.. Uhh.” He scratches the back of his head and looks down at the makeshift bed he’s laying in.
“You don’t have it again do you? You know I can’t cover for you again this month man.”
“Yea, I know. When is it due?”
“Three days. Why the fuck can’t you keep track of time? It’s not that fuckin’ hard man.”
“Fuck off. It’s not like we’ve got jobs and lives to look after. There’s not much point is there? ”
“Well, I’m just sayin’ it would be a hell of a lot less stress if you could keep track of what day it was.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a pack of lucky strikes. I always found ways to make money, so I always had shit like cigarettes and food. Spence wasn’t so good at it, so I was always covering for him. Not that I really minded, that’s what you do for your buddies, right? I mean, he always had at least some of the money for rent. And besides, paying for his shit kept the social order of our rental space clearly defined. Not that I’m all that into power, but sometimes things are easier when people feel like they owe you things.
“Well, you’ve got a couple of days to pull it together man, I’d cover for you again but it’s been tight for me too.”
“Yea, yea I know. I know where there’s some work today, but it’s too far away for me to get there on my bike. I would have had to leave last night.”
“Right. Where is it.”
“Fucking Long Island.” Spence sat up in bed. “Can I have a smoke.”
“Didn’t you hear me say that money is tight for me too man?”
I still pulled one out and threw it on his bed. He kept looking at me with that useless look on his face until I threw my matches at him too.
“Sometimes you’re so useless ace.”
“Quit calling me ace.” He said and lit his smoke.
“What the fuck kind of work is there out on Long Island that you can’t find here.”
“You know perfectly well that I’ve been blacklisted from all the docks around the city.”
“There’s other work.”
“Yea, well I can’t find it.”
I was kind of lucky. I was a kid when the new travel restrictions went into place and I lived close enough to my school that it wasn’t a burden on my folks. Back then public school was still pretty much free. These days if you’ve got your high school diploma you can find work pretty easy. Someone always needs people to write or do numbers. I can do that. Things would be easier if I could find computer work. I can do that too but there aren’t that many computers around. A fucking Macintosh could cost as much as some 3rd world nations debt these days, and the big companies that still operate kept their computer guys on staff. So instead I, like most everyone else in the city do itinerant work.
Spence on the other hand wasn’t so lucky. He lived too far away from any schools to keep going to one once the restrictions took effect. He’d been bussed to school, and once there weren’t any busses he was just plain fucked, and livin’ out in the country like he did the only thing for him to do was work labor, only there’s plenty of guys out in the country faster, stronger and probably smarter than Spence. Here at first he could find messenger jobs with his bike, but then he got drummed out of the messenger racket for losing a package and now he’s stuck serving meals to the guys that work the docks. He keeps getting blacklisted from these jobs ‘cause he has a real knack for pissing folks off. You put him unattended in a room full of strangers and within 10 minutes at least one of them wants to kill him or at least hurt him pretty good. It’s not like he tries to do it, but he just has a knack for saying the wrong thing to the wrong fuckin’ guy, and unfortunately for him, there are only 4 or 5 guys who run the dockworkers lines in the city now. He’s had run ins with all five as of last week.
“You had to tell that Polack joke to the foreman didn’t you?”
“Ugh, shut up. I don’t want to think about it.”
“Well, you’d better start thinking about it, because you need some fucking money, right?” I took the matches back from him and lit my own smoke. “What’s this gig on Long Island?”
“Some bullshit out at the airport. There are a couple of planes full of important foreign people coming in and they want to give them the royal treatment or something so they’re whipping up some goddamned feast or something. A guy told me about it yesterday but I was too fucking high to think about it.
“Shit. Too High? You weren’t with that fat bitch again were you?”
“Come on man, don’t call her that will ya?”
”That fat bitch” is Spence’s girlfriend. Well, sometimes she is. Neither of us know for sure where she makes her money, but I figure that she’s whoring. She’s always got enough cash to live alone and have drugs, but she’ll never tell anyone what she does. She says she doesn’t want anyone “getting in on her action.” She’s generous enough with her dope though, at least with Spence she is.
“Whatever.” I turned to walk away, but stopped short and looked back at him, “You know, you could take the tr-”
“Not a fucking chance! No!” He just sat there on the bed shaking his head back and forth real slow.
“Well, look asshole If you can’t come up with the money for rent we’re both out of here, and personally I don’t really feel like staying on the street again. Even if I could come up with the money to get another storage space like this one, you know how fucking long the waiting lists are. I could be on the street for years because you’re too much of an asshole to chance taking the train!”
“I haven’t taken the train once since the restrictions and I’m not going to do it now. No way.”
“Well then what the fuck are you going to do?”
“I’ll come up with something.”
“Yea, well, be quick about it.” I turned around, put on my coat and rolled up the orange garage style door on our rental space. “I’m going to find some work. You’d better find a way to come up with that money or I swear man...” I cut my rant short, shook my head just like he’d been shaking his and walked away.

Part 2

I’d been working at this job that wasn’t too far away from our apartment at the Moishes Mini-Storage for a couple of weeks. They weren’t going to keep me on much longer, but I had managed to save up enough cash to tide me over for a while once this gig was up. The place was a little Japanese noodle booth run by a huge black guy named Al. Al was from Arkansas. He told everyone that he learned Japanese cooking while he was in the military, but I knew that the secret to his mediocre success and his less successful broth had more to do with MSG filled Nissen Soups packets and reconstituted noodles than it did with anything that you could call cooking. He needed me to look over their receipts before tax season, and he paid me well enough to keep his little secret about instant noodles quiet, so I sat in the alley behind their six by six booth with a milk crate for a desk and an old Texas Instruments calculator to work out how much he had made with his little scheme.
Every once in a while Al would poke his head out of the back door to make sure that I was still there, and that I wasn’t sharing his secret recipe of “3 parts shrimp flavored powder, 2 parts beef flavored powder, a pinch of mushroom flavored powder, and a dash of teriyaki sauce,” with one of the many fictitious competitors that was always trying to find out his secret herbs and spices. I had done this for Al every year now for a few years. This year he showed his gratitude by only making me pay half of the price on a bowl of noodles.
“It’s ‘bout noontime” Al’s gut protruded past the door before his head could make its way around the corner. “You hungry yet?”
“No thanks Al. I’ll wait till I’m done for the afternoon if you don’t mind.” I put down the pencil and picked up the cigarette that was sitting on the edge of my milk crate desk. “How’s business today?”
“Little slow or I wouldn’t be out here wit’choo.” he peeked back over his shoulder through the door toward the counter and after having surmised that no one was going to want his noodles too soon he stepped out into the alley and re-lit a half smoked cigarette that had been stashed behind his ear. “You still seein’ that little blonde bike messenger you was seein last year?”
“Nah, she’s gone. I think she was heading north to get to her folks in Massachusetts and tried riding the Metro north out of the city. I’m not sure if she got there, or if the lottery got her” I inspected the eternally greasy pavement of the alley.
“Mmm. Sorry. What’s a girl like that doing trying to ride the damn train anyhow?” he pulled off of his cigarette and talked through the exhalation of smoke, “perfectly good bike messenger legs could have taken her all the way wherever she wanted to go without taking the chance.”
“Her Dad got sick. and she panicked. Didn’t think she was going to make it up there before he died or something if she rode, so she took her chances with the train.”
“You know,” another peek over his shoulder at the counter before going on “I heard about another one just yesterday, that makes 3 this month.”
“Yesterday?” I kind of froze, wondering if Spence had been on that train. Your odds were usually pretty good most of the time, but they were doing it more and more lately. “Do you know which line they did?”
“I think it was the A train. They did two of the cars.”
“Hmm.” I was starting to feel a little sick to my stomach.
“I still can’t understand why people are dumb enough to ride those things” Al stomped out his cigarette and went back inside. Meanwhile, I’m stuck looking at a receipt for a tub of MSG with pictures of my dead girlfriend and my possibly dead roommate floating around in my head.
It had been nearly a week since I had seen hide or hair of Spence, and I was growing increasingly concerned that the little bitch fit I had thrown at him the last time I saw him had pushed him far enough to jump a train out to that job he had been talking about. Spence was a regular pain in my ass most days, but I’d known him for long enough that I kind of liked the fucker. That, and I didn’t want to completely lose out on the cash that he owed me.
It was completely probable that it was his train that had been gassed. He rides the A way the fuck out there, then rides his bike the rest of the way. At least that’s what he used to do when they had just been giving out tickets as a deterrent to riding the train.
Here’s how it goes down when it happens. Your train pulls into the station and a computer somewhere in the MTA system generates some random numbers. Like a lottery system. If that number is the magic number, the doors on one of the cars of the train stay shut and they flood the car first with a sleeping gas, then with a deadly toxic gas.

Part 3

“What the… huh…” I hate waking up in the middle of the night. I do it a lot, and it always means that I’m going to feel like shit the next day, but someone’s rattling the door to my storage space. Either it’s Spence or something is very wrong.
Trying to see through the film of city grit that is trying to glue my eyes shut, I reach around behind my futon pad for the piece of re-bar that sits there.
“Who the hell is there!”
The rattling at the door stops for a second and quickly starts again.
“You open that goddamned door, I’m gonna taze your ass till you’re crispy!” Of course it’s an empty threat, and an obvious one at that.
The bolt snaps open, and the bottom of the door cracks open just enough to let in the mist of everpresent city light like an explosion of phosphorescent dust. “It’s just me man take it easy.”
“Jesus, Spencer you fucking idiot, get in here and lock the door.” The door lifts halfway up and he ducks under, rattling it closed behind him.
“When did you get a tazer man, wasn’t that expensive?”
“Where the fuck have you been? It’s been 5 days.”
“I had to stay out where I could get work” he kicks off his shoes “Got a smoke? And really, where’d you get a tazer?”
“ugh, I don’t have a tazer, and yea sure you can have a cigarette.” I poke around on the floor for the jeans that my smokes are in. “So you got 5 days of work?” 2 left in the pack, and I’m handing one to my slob of an unreliable roommate. “Do you have rent now at least.”
“Not 5 days really, but yea I got rent” He tosses over a wad of cash wrapped in the kind of rubber band that I remember used to hold together bundles of broccoli or asparagus. “Got a light?”
“You know, I was talking to Al and he had me convinced you’d been gassed in a pop-con lottery gassing.”
“In a gas for gas?” drawing on his newly lit cigarette, “nah, I told you the other day I wasn’t stupid enough to take the train. Not that desparate.”
“Right”
“But it did happen right near me,” his face twists almost imperceptibly in the half-light of the storage unit and is regular again almost instantly. “And it is why I was gone so long.”
“mmm? What do you mean?” I look at the orange and black disk on the end of my freshly lit last Marlboro and blow my first drag back at the ember to watch it glow brighter.
“You know they pay locally to do the dirty work. I was right out at the end of the train line where they did it. And they come out to the warehouses by there looking for day workers like me and they say, ‘hey we’ve got work that pays good’ so those of us that are still waiting jump out of line and go right along.”
“As we’re getting into their truck I’m starting to get an idea of what we’re about to do, ya’ know. It’s like an MTA truck with their symbol on it and all, and I know they don’t just come hiring anybody to do work in their yards or on the trains or shit you know, cause that’s tech… well you know why, but what I’m sayin’ is that I just kind of know, right?” He pulls off the cigarette and steps over to his area and starts shuffling stuff around. “And I was right. We get there and they give us these suits to put on. White ones with boots and gloves, then they give us masks with the filters on the sides and goggles for our eyes.” That shadow moves across his face, only stays there a little longer now, then he shakes it off and after a pause just looking off into the air starts again.
“You know you come off like you’re tough all the time right. Like you know shit. You, me, every-stinkin’ person on the street is out there and we’ve all got it in for each other. Like when I was comin’ in, and you were ready to bean me in the head with that piece of metal you’ve got stashed behind your bed.”
I looked in my lap to the steel bar that sat there inert, intended to beat in the skulls of imagined attackers, never used because there had never been any threat.
“Every day I wonder who I’m going to have to fight to get what’s mine. I think ‘which son-of-a-bitch am I going to have to have it out with over my place in line for work, or over soup at the lunch line.”
“But, I never have to. I’ve never done it. And I look in the eyes of the guys around me and I know they’re thinking the same thing as me. I know they’re thinking ‘stay away from mine.’”
“But we don’t have to fight or kill or ever size up to each other one-on-one over anything. ‘Cause it’s already done for us.” Stubbing out the cigarette on the floor next to his bedroll he looks up at me. “and I cleaned it up today.”

Part 4

“So wait, what are you telling me, what the fuck were you doing?”

“I was piling dead bodies up in trucks to go to the incinerator. By the hundreds man. You know they don’t just gas one car at a time now, they gas the whole train.”

“Yea, I know. It’s fucking disgusting. The taste of my cigarette has turned acrid in my unwashed mouth. I need water, I need a fucking drink.

Spence goes over closes the door and slides the lock into place. Then he’s just standing there looking at the lock smoking one of my last 2 cigarettes. “Then of course you have to clean up all the shit and piss on the train, cause everybody’s bodies just push everything out when that gas hits. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that smell man. It’s not like the sewage that you smell in the streets. It’s this fresh smell, mixed with the gas.” He smokes for another minute “Then we cleaned the gas off the walls and ceiling and seats, and the train went back out, and motherfuckers got back on it not knowing any better. Not knowing that they were sitting in some dead asshole’s seat.”

I’m just sitting there in my bed listening. I’ve never known anyone who’s seen the gassings. When people disappear, I figure it’s either that or one of the other new population control methods picked up after all the changes started taking place. There were way too fucking many of us and there just wasn’t enough shit to go around. Food, drinking water, gas, electricity, space; there just wasn’t enough of any of it to go around anymore.

People refused to give shit up on their own, so the government started with rations, and things got ugly because we felt like we were entitled to have all the things that we had grown accustomed to since the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, technological and information revolutions. But we weren’t entitled to any of it. We started to find out what our “inalienable rights” really were when the cards were on the table. And they weren’t much in comparison to what we had been enjoying.

Pockets of people around the country had begun revolting. If you can call farmers with shotguns being mowed down before even being able to see the army a revolution. Of course with the way things were, the government decided that we needed military rule, or martial law or whatever. The cities took it lying down. People said a lot of things, and held demonstrations that never did any good, because they didn’t have any way of fighting, and were already used to being corralled by their police forces.

It’s not like they took everything away from us. If you weren’t pointing guns at them they treated you just like they did before, only they did it with a large military presence.

What they gave us were options. We are after all still a democracy, so we got to vote. We were given the choice of how to kill ourselves. Of course the sensible routes had been tried first, but the Christians kept having kids despite the birth control laws. No one would face how serious it was. Most of them still don’t.

So those of us with the deadly combination of a voter’s card and lack of a soul decided that the best ways to keep our numbers in check was to randomly choose those people who were using more resources than others. Here in the city that means a random lottery of gassings on public transportation. Busses and trains were the only means of transportation allowed to “non-essential personnel” which is what you were termed if you weren’t driving a military vehicle. And those busses and trains were using the highly valuable coal and oil that we were so short on.

It’s not random though, of course. The people that can afford to work close to home or like me, can scrape work off the streets we don’t have to worry about it. It’s those like Spencer here who never learned to do anything useful really. They have to rely on the transportation to get to where there is work to be had.

A lot of people looked back to the last depression and did what those before them had done. They walked out into the country. They went upstate, or to Pennsylvania and further looking for farm work. But some of us just stuck it out here. I stayed because I knew that I was useless as a manual laborer. It would be worse for me out there than it would be here. Spence didn’t leave because he was shacked up with a girl who could take care of herself. But, as soon as she realized that he couldn’t take care of himself, that came to a quick end, and that puts him right here with me in a ten by ten Moishe’s storage locker smoking one of my last cigarettes knowing that the best work that he’s had in years was cleaning up the piss, shit and carnage of the decisions that we all made.